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INTRODUCTION TO PARADISE LOST:

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL AND EXPOSITORY.

SECTION I. FIRST AND SUBSEQUENT EDITIONS OF THE POEM. SECTION II. CONCEPTION OF THE POEM AND HISTORY OF ITS

COMPOSITION.

SECTION III. SCHEME AND MEANING OF THE POEM.

SECTION IV. ON THE QUESTION OF MILTON'S INDEBTEDNESS IN THE POEM TO PARTICULAR MODERN AUTHORS.

INTRODUCTION

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL AND EXPOSITORY

SECTION I

FIRST AND Subsequent Editions OF THE POEM

It was possibly just before the Great Fire of London in September 1666, and it certainly cannot have been very long after that event, when Milton, then residing in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, had the manuscript of his Paradise Lost ready to receive the official licence necessary for its publication. The duty of licensing such books was then vested by law in the Archbishop of Canterbury, who performed it through his chaplains. The Archbishop of Canterbury at that time (1663-1677) was Dr. Gilbert Sheldon; and the chaplain to whom it fell to examine the manuscript of Paradise Lost was the Rev. Thomas Tomkyns, M.A. of Oxford, then incumbent of St. Mary Aldermary, London, and afterwards Rector of Lambeth, Chancellor of the Cathedral Church of Exeter, and D.D. He was the Archbishop's domestic chaplain, and a great favourite of his, and, though but a young man, was already the author of one or two books or pamphlets. The nature of his opinions may be guessed from the fact that his first publication, printed in the year of the Restoration, had been entitled "The Rebel's Plea Examined; or, Mr. Baxter's Judgment concerning the Late War." A subsequent publication of his, penned not long after he had examined Paradise Lost, was entitled "The Inconveniencies of Toleration"; and, when he died in 1675, still young, he was described on his tombstone as having been "Ecclesia Anglicana contra Schismaticos assertor eximius.”1 A

1 Wood's Athenæ, by Bliss, iii. 1046-1048.

manuscript by a man of Milton's political and ecclesiastical antecedents could hardly, one would think, have fallen into the hands of a more unpropitious examiner. It is accordingly stated that Tomkyns hesitated about giving the licence, and took exception to some passages in the poem,-particularly to that (Book I. lines 594 -599) where it is said of Satan, in his diminished brightness after his fall, that he still appeared

"as when the Sun, new-risen,

Looks through the horizontal misty air

Shorn of his beams, or from behind a cloud,

In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs."

At length, however, Mr. Tomkyns was satisfied. There still exists the first book of the actual manuscript which had been submitted to him. It is a fairly-written copy, in a light, not inelegant, but rather characterless hand of the period,—of course, not that of Milton himself, who had been for fourteen years totally blind. It consists of eighteen leaves of small quarto, stitched together; and on the inside of the first leaf, or cover, is the following official licence to print in Tomkyns's hand:

Imprimatur:

THO. TOMKYNS, Rmo. in Christo Patri ac Domino, Dno. Gilberto, divinâ Providentia Archiepiscopo Cantuariensi, à sacris domesticis.

The other books of the manuscript having received a similar certificate, or this certificate on the MS. of the first book sufficing for all, the copy was ready for publication by any printer or bookseller to whom Milton might consign it. Having already had many

1 Toland's Life of Milton, prefixed to Edition of Milton's Prose Works, 1698; PP. 40, 41.

2 The manuscript is described, and a facsimile of a portion of it is given, in Mr. Samuel Leigh Sotheby's Ramblings in Elucidation of the Autograph of Milton, 1861; pp. 196, 197. It was then in the possession of William Baker, Esq., of Bayfordsbury, Hertfordshire, to whom it had descended, with other relics of interest, in consequence of the marriage of an ancestor with Mary, the eldest daughter of the second Jacob Tonson, of the famous publishing family of the Tonsons. Bishop Newton, in his Life of Milton, 1749, mentions the manuscript as then in possession of the third Jacob Tonson, who was brother of the said Mary. How it came to be in the Tonson family at all will appear in the course of this Introduction.

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